isthe name of a magnificent book written by Irving Howe. The book describes
the migration of two million eastern European Jews from the Russian Empire to
America between 1891 and 1914. The authorthen
continues by showing how in three generations the now American Jews lifted
themselves up from the hideous slums of the New York City lower east side to
wealth and prominence in America.

World of Our Fathers was
published in 1976 and is over seven hundred pages long. It ends with a chapter
called “At Ease in America.”

This
book stands in sharp contrast to a book by two Harvard professors, Gerhard Sonnert
and Gerald Holton, called What Happened to the Children Who Fled Nazi
Persecution. This book was published in 2006 and describes the lives of some
28 thousand children who arrived in the United States from Germany between 1933,
when the persecutions began, and 1941, when the Second World War closed the
doors of the United States until 1945, when the war was over.

There
are some remarkable differences between these two immigrations. The first is
that the eastern European Jews usually came as families. These families included
two or more generations who came together and settled in the terrible slums of
the late 19th and early 20th centuries. By contrast, the
majority of the German Jews of the Nazi era came alone because their families
had been murdered.

It is common to believe that the
Holocaust started after the invasion of Poland in 1939. That was not true for
the German Jews, who became the targets of persecution in January of 1933 as
soon as the Nazis had usurped the government.

A
second difference between these two immigrations was that it took three
generations for the eastern European immigrants to succeed. According to
immigration historians such as Wittke and others, that is true of every ethnic
group who has ever come here, with one exception. The German Jews of the
1930’s and 40's succeeded themselves in one generation. The immigrants
themselves became academics, physicians, lawyers, major businessmen, and even
members of Congress.

A third difference between the two
immigrant communities was that the eastern European Jews were helped by the then
wealthy American Jews descendant from the German Jewish immigrants who had come
in the 1840’s. Outstanding among those who helped the most was Lillian Wald,
daughter of a wealthy Jewish family from Rochester, N.Y.She founded the Visiting Nurse Service, which helped innumerable Jewish
families who lived under horrible conditions in the New York tenement slums.
Meanwhile, the richest man in the American Jewish community, Jacob Schiff,
financed innumerable charities for the benefit of the poor Jews.

The German Jews who came during the
Nazi era could not freely enter the United States as had been the case before
1924. After that year, only immigrants having an “affidavit of support” from
an American citizen could enter this country. There were of course some American
Jews who risked their fortune to bring into this country German Jews who might
have become a burden to them. That hardly every happened. There were also large
Jewish organizations in this country who collected considerable sums from
American Jews with a view of helping the German Jews with travel expenses and
the necessary “affidavit.” The Germans had stolen everything belonging to
the Jews, so that they could not pay for their own passage or anything else.
Unfortunately, the record shows that the majority of the money collected was
never used to help the Jewish victims desperate to get out of Germany. Instead
the money was used to pay huge salaries to “executive directors” of social
service agencies who also needed travel funds to attend endless conferences and
who also needed hotel expenses and the help of numerous assistants, etc. etc.,
until next to nothing was left for the German Jews. Of the 580,000 Jews living
in Germany in 1933, the year Hitler became dictator, only a third survived
despite the fact that the war did not start until 1939 and the U.S. was not
involved until 1941. For all those years, not much was done by the American
Jewish community to allow the German Jews to survive.

Of course, some did survive and some
did get here before 1941. These German refugees soon discovered that their
American brethren did not want them. Utterly destitute and traumatized by
horrible experiences, these refugees were now blamed for the reputed
“arrogance” of the German Jews of the nineteenth and early twentieth
century. This despite the fact that Albert Ballin, the owner of the
“Hamburg-Amerika Paket Aktiengesellschaft” (HAPAG) established a whole
colony of houses giving shelter and free food to the eastern European Jews who
traveled from Hamburg to New York on his ships. Many other German Jews also
helped, but, as Shakespeare wrote, “The evil that men do lives after them, the
good is oft interred with their bones” (Julius Caesar Act III, Scene 2).
German Jews were also told that they “refused to speak Yiddish” because of
their arrogance. The truth is that Yiddish was not spoken in Germany, so that
these refugees did not know the language.

It would be a sacrilege to deny that
the eastern European Jews attained enormous success in this country in three
generations. Innumerable major scientists, writers, business leaders, and
politicians have illuminated the American landscape during the past sixty years.
No doubt the American Jewish community has contributed mightily to American life
and has earned many rewards for it.

That then leads to the need to answer
the question: “How did the German Jewish children who came alone or with
abbreviated families succeed in one generation?” Immigration historians
have recorded that every ethnic group who ever came here took three generations
to ascend to the “American Dream.” Except the German Jewish children. We
emphasize children. These children had no money, usually no parents or other
relatives, and were largely rejected by the American Jewish community.

Well, Sonnert and Holton haveanswered that question best understood in the words of one of their
respondents, who said, “I still work at 74 because of my fear of poverty and
rejection.”It appears that
almost all the German Jewish immigrants who came as children, i.e. when less
than 18 years of age, share that same fear. Rejected at home by their fellow
countrymen, again rejected in America by the fellow Jews, they cannot rid
themselves of the belief that unless they perform on and on and on, they will be
again treated “like a skunk at a picnic.” To this day, in 2010, these
erstwhile refugees feel compelled to work and work and work lest their fears
come true. Indeed, the facts do not support the emotions. Yet the emotions rule.

Now, in 2010, the fifth generation of
the eastern European Jews has arrived and is going strong in America. Yet, this
generation, utterly ignorant of Jewish history, is destroying all that which
their elders died for in Europe. Now, over 53 percent of Jews marry non-Jews,
with the result that there are no Jewish grandchildren for them .A recent survey by Gallup revealed that 52% of former Jews are now
atheists and that only about 40% of Americans labeled Jews by the media support
synagogues or other Jewish institutions. Two years ago some New York ex-Jews
founded an organization called Jstreet, which is devoted to the destruction of
Israel. This organization seeks to influence Congress and the president not to
support Israel in any manner. At their convention they allowed the most radical
Arab haters to speak and propagandize the Arab cause, as does a magazine called
“Tikkun,” whose editor and whose contributors hold the same views.

Indeed, it would once more seem that
the Jewish people cannot survive all our enemies. The United Nations, the direct
successor of the old Nazi party, is today the agent of all the hate and bigotry
once supplied by the German propaganda machine. Meanwhile, American Jews are
quickly promoting the disappearance of Jews and Judaism from America.

Yet, we do not despair. We have been
there before and survived all the Torquemadas and Hitlers despite our terrible
losses. Even our ex-Jewish enemies like Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky and
many others will not destroy us. Indeed, these former Jews, now allied with our
worst enemies, believe, in he words of Winston Churchill, that “ the crocodile
will eat them last.” Yet, we believe that we will never be destroyed because
we have that Jewish courage that never gives in bimhayro v’ymenoo.